


Survival Of The Fittest

by Godspeed_Cowboy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Blood, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Chuunin Exams, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dead People, Death, Forced Cannibalism, Forest of Death, Gen, Graphic Description, Haruno Sakura Has Issues, Haruno Sakura Needs a Hug, Haruno Sakura-centric, Horror, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, I listened to Sally Face Memories and Dreams on loop, Injury, Kinda, One Shot, POV Haruno Sakura, Protective Haruno Sakura, Sakura get traumatzed, Shock, Survival, Survival Horror, Training Ground 44, Trauma, Violence, Wounds, dead bodies, forest, no choice, poor Sakura she's just a kid, she didn't ask for this, she doesn't get one, while writing this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:15:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26073280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Godspeed_Cowboy/pseuds/Godspeed_Cowboy
Summary: Sakura needs to eat.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke, Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura & Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 10
Kudos: 117





	Survival Of The Fittest

**Author's Note:**

> Howdy y'all, I am SO sorry for not posting a new chapter to Pretty Woman yesterday or today, I slept in and had work to do. As an apology, I offer y'all this violent and sad one shot with Sakura, my favorite punching bag who I love.
> 
> Twitter: @YeehawMitski

There's the sound of crickets and frogs and whatever terrors of the night in her ears and the smell of expired meat and forest in the air, her nose.

Sakura is curled up and huddled over her boys under a tree in the pit of its roots in the Forest of Death. Sasuke’s fever has yet to stop, has yet to even cool. If she wanted to, she could say that it was probably rising instead. Naruto is still out cold, but he’s injured so she cleans his cuts as best as she can, checks on them periodically. Usually, he heals fast, but at this rate, his wounds might get worse so she’ll have to take him along with Sasuke to the infirmary at the forest’s Tower.

She dips two rags, both from a small standard issue first aid kit, into the bowl carved out from the earth, filled with slightly murky water from a little creek nearby. It’s all she has to work with, to clean her hands and the rags with. One rag goes on to Sasuke’s forehead as she takes the old one off to wash and then hang up on a spare branch. She’ll need to get some water in him soon, the boy is sweating like a _pig_ and dehydration is something they need to _avoid_ with him right now. The other rag is used to clean around the nasty gash on Naruto’s right arm. It’s stopped bleeding, but there’s a redness around it that’s slowly spreading and there’s something yellow leaking out. Signs of infection. She’s already used up all the cream and bandages from the kit so the only thing she can do for now is continually rinse and wash it and hope for the best.

Sakura’s stomach growls, loud in the night, and for a moment she’s afraid that something that _isn’t_ human heard it, though she relaxes when nothing bursts out of the bushes.

She’ll need to eat soon. She can’t run on an empty stomach like she can on the caffeine pills keeping her awake. She rubs at her eyes, hands grimy with a multitude of things and smearing it all over her face.

She opens their packs too see what there was to eat.

All she sees is empty wrappers and crumbs. Not good.

She can’t go out and hunt, not at night, not with potential enemies lurking around every corner, things that want to eat her. Her stomach growls louder, and this time it comes with a small pang of hurt. 

She looks outside the pit to see if there’s any plants she can sneak food from.

There’s nothing but three bodies lying on the ground. Three bodies with sound headbands that had fallen right into her log trap, skulls split open. There are maggots eating at their brains. It’s been about a day and the effects of decomposition are showing _already_ , the process probably being sped up with the strange gases in the air. They are not toxic to the _living_ , but once you die you’re up for grabs.

There’s foam leaking from their mouths and noses, pink, and their bodies are bloated. By tomorrow they’re skin should start changing color and their organs in their stomachs should start to accumulate gases. From their pile, the smell of rot.

Her stomach growls again, and this time it churns with the thought that crosses her head. 

They were taught war tactics, just in case, ones that would help them survive, ones they would have to use when they ran out of choices.

And Sakura has none, has no other _choices_ , no other _options_. She swallows, throat dry, hands shaking, and sweating (But not as bad as Sasuke.).

Slowly, she creeps out of the pit, fingers sinking into the mud below, getting under her nails. Her breath comes out with a shudder, teeth clacking together like she’s cold, and it’s so loud in her ears. Her heart pounds against her chest, the beats uneven but patterned at the same time somehow.

The ground beneath her squishes with each step. She takes her time, delaying the inevitable. 

She squats down next to one, the boy with brown hair who called himself Zaku. He’ll do. He’s big, muscled, and he has a lot on him.

She pokes at one limp arm once, twice, to make sure he’s really dead. A stupid thing of her to do, of course he’s dead.

Sakura’s the one who killed him after all.

She grabs on a limp arm, drags it closer to her, and she pulls down the sleeve hiding.

She takes in one more, breath preparing herself for what happens next.

And then she lifts the forearm to her mouth and bites down hard.

The skin parts under her teeth like butter under a hot knife, surprisingly, with a wet squelch. It’s probably been weakened by the decomposition. Then she feels the fat and the muscle. Then her teeth connect with bone. Her tongue pushes under it, under her bite to help separate it from the rest of the arm. It all feels different from how she imagined, but it doesn’t make it any less disgusting. Sakura gags. There’s still blood that hasn’t left in the form of foam, hasn’t clotted yet, and it drips down her chin and floods her mouth, and it doesn’t taste the same as the blood of the living. 

She gags again. The flesh finally separates and she begins to work it under her teeth, chews to break it down. She tries to go fast to get it over with. She feels lightheaded. There’s tears spilling down her face and she sniffles like the child that she is. 

Sakura gags a third time when she tries to swallow it, and this time she almost throws up bile but she puts it down and tries again. 

It slides down her throat leaving a thick coat of something along its walls and her mouth feels weird. There’s bits of flesh stuck between her teeth and she’s violent in the way she shoves her fingers in to pick them out.

She looks down at the arm, a gaping red, pink, and white hole of death and decay, and this time she does throw up, in her mouth. There’s chunks, and if she let it fall out it would probably be red.

But as it is, she can’t let anything go to waste. She swallows it back down and her throat burns.

And then she lifts the arm up to her mouth again and takes another bite, and she lets out a long, high sob. She swallows. Another bite, more tears stream down her face, and she begins to feel worse and worse, sicker and sicker and she swallows. Beneath her a puddle of tears start to grow and she almost drops the arm from how much she’s shaking. 

Sakura doesn’t stop eating until she’s full and she’s never hated anything more than the need to eat as of now. 

She’s eaten the entire forearm, bone bared to the rest of the world with scraps of meat still clinging to it that she didn’t suck off. There’s blood on her hands now, blood on her face and her dress. It feels dirty. 

She feels dirty. She feels _guilty_.

Stumbling away from the bodies, she collapses back into the tree’s pit with her boys and scrapes her hands on the stones peeking from the ground. 

She’s eaten now. She’s okay now. She can take care of Naruto and Sasuke now.

She’s fine, she’s fine, she’s _fine-_

No, she is not fine. She just ate a person. A _person_. A person _she killed_. Her stomach lurches.

What has she _done_?

. . . Survived . . . She has survived. _Sakura_ has survived. She’s done what she has to do to survive, to pass this stage of the exams, to make sure she and her team lives to become the chuunin they deserve to be. 

Mechanically, she goes through the motions of taking care of the boys. She does not think about the bodies outside and she doesn’t think about how she’ll have to eat more later.

(When morning comes, the boys wake up finally and briefly freak out over her appearance. Outside their pit, there are skeletons and they ask her if some wild animal came by, attacked them and attacked her. Sakura nods. She doesn’t tell them about what she had to do last night. They don’t need to know.)

**Author's Note:**

> See y'all tomorrow when I post again, lemme know what y'all think of this!


End file.
